Airport kiosks offer CPR training

It’s probably one of the last things you’re thinking about as you head on your way to catch a flight, but a new airport kiosk that offers life-saving CPR training just might be your best stop before the boarding gate.

About 700,000 people in America have a heart attack each year and half of those are sudden heart attacks with no advanced warning. Of the unexpected attacks, almost 90 percent occur at home. In these cases, experts recommend CPR as the number one immediate course of action … and now there’s a new way to learn the procedure.

Researchers devised a walk-up kiosk that projects a training video and has a dummy attached to a table for practice. They placed the kiosk at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport in Texas and recruited 100 passengers to participate in a study geared toward finding out how well a person could be trained using this technology. Half the group was shown the one-minute video. The video included specific instructions for how to perform CPR, right down to doing chest compressions while humming the Bee Gees’ song “Staying Alive,” which contains the correct beat for those compressions. Then all participants were brought into a separate room where they were presented with a mannequin that was experiencing a simulated heart attack. The researchers found that the group who watched the training was much quicker to call 9-1-1, jumped in quicker to carry out the chest compressions, and actually performed chest compressions at the correct rates.

In their findings, presented at the American Heart Association’s Resuscitation Science Symposium, the researchers noted that due to its high degree of success, such a kiosk would be beneficial at any public venue. So get ready to see these kiosks popping up in public places sometime soon. And start practicing your best Bee Gees.